Artist Carmen Einfinger Wins

International Competition to Design Outdoor Gallery in Gdansk, Poland



Project’s Aim is Urban Revitalization


NEW YORK – New York-based painter Carmen Einfinger has won an  
international competition to transform Dolna Square in Gdansk,  
Poland, into a vibrant outdoor gallery. The only U.S.-based artist  
selected to participate in the competition, now in its third year,  
Einfinger’s proposal ranked above those of seven architects and  
designers from several European countries. Einfinger’s design 
—“the Scent of Color”—will revitalize the green space, a  
terminus for one of the city’s public buses in the neglected Lower  
City District, making it a bright, welcoming, gathering point. The  
project is slated for completion in 2011.

“There will be a feeling of harmony beauty and playfulness, which is  
central to my desire to create art.  At first glance, the park may  
evoke graffiti, but upon closer inspection it will reveal a more  
orderly and primal way of scribbling and coloring to create a  
fanciful dream-like world, an imaginary city where diversity is a  
cause for hope and creative expression,” said Einfinger.

Einfinger will redesign of the Dolna Square as a festive oasis,  
incorporating a bus stop, kiosk, a garden, benches, lampposts and  
trees be-decked with birdhouses, a fountain, and a serpentine walkway  
in lively colors and undulating, organic patterns. Inspired by the  
exuberance of Gdansk’s Kameralna Restaurant and of pop and youth  
culture, her design reflects the city’s potential for rebirth as an  
aesthetically sophisticated environment. Einfinger’s transformation  
of public space through sensuous color and form recalls the work of  
Gaudi in Barcelona, Hundertwasser in Vienna, and Nikki de Saint  
Phalle in Paris.

In the artist’s statement she submitted for the competition,  
Einfinger points out that Gdansk was a lynchpin in the fall of  
communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka and the wellspring of the peaceful  
solidarity movement that led to the end of communism throughout the  
world. Her project, she said, will “transform the currently  
neglected and defunct Lower Town into a spatial experience of a  
crossroad—a moment of possibility that we can universally access  
through the unusual color combinations and the archetypal forms. I  
wanted to change this park into a creative force, turning loneliness  
and idleness into community action.” Birdhouses in the trees, she  
said, signify the park as a doorway to the world, as their  
inhabitants bring joyful sounds to the urban environment, while vivid  
colors and free, whimsical shapes will brighten the spirit. “The  
space will have an inclusive nature, drawing people of all ages and  
ethnicities,” she noted.

ABOUT CARMEN EINFINGER

Born in Nottingham, England, an expatriate in Brazil for 17 years,  
and a resident of New York for the past 18 years, Carmen Einfinger  
earned her BA in painting at the State University of New York,  
Buffalo, and did graduate studies in painting at the Rhode Island  
School of Design and Brown University, where she held an Andrew  
Mellon Fellowship. The recipient of numerous grant awards, she has  
been the focus of solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in  
Albania, China, Czechoslovakia, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Germany,  
Taiwan, Turkey, and U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Dallas,  
Los Angeles, and New York. Her work is represented in many private  
collections.

British art critic Judy Walshe notes, that Einfinger “used a large  
variety of material and objects to paint on from the very beginning.  
Recently she produced outdoor pieces (installations, sculptures and  
performances) in New York, Beijing, Taiwan and Italy involving the  
communities in the production process. Einfinger's work has  
manifested a singular personal vision, drawing on a diverse cross- 
section of cultures and styles to realize her wide range of visual  
and conceptual ideas. Einfinger is an intuitive artist who has  
developed a new and unique contribution to the art and culture of her  
times. Her extensive travels in Europe and Asia have been a major  
influence, releasing her from the usual conventions of art making.  
Her method is contemplative, meditative, and sanguine. She maintains  
a fantastical, exotic vision, even when dealing with the commonplace.  
The paradoxes in her work lie within the blurring of boundaries  
between interior and exterior, self and others, the physical and  
psychical, sustaining an extraordinary view into the ordinary.”  For  
information, visit her web site – www.carmeneinfinger.com.



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